IBM Shows The Power of Turning Data Into Actionable Information and Collaborative Email for Growing Businesses

IBM’s an amazing company, doing some pretty good things for growing businesses. Recently it launched business apps for iOS in conjunction with Apple. While Apple knows the power of consumers, entertainment and communication. IBM knows what businesses want and can help make Apple even more valuable for businesses.

During a recent press event IBM showcased the power of data analysis through Watson. It also showcased a new way to communicate, called IBM Verse.

IBM’s Watson technology is deceptively simple and powerful. You take a set of data, maybe in a spreadsheet or database. IBM Watson displays the data in a way that make sense – so you can glean USEFUL and ACTIONABLE information to help you make decisions about your business. There’s so much buzz about “big data” but until you see it in action – you really don’t know what it is or how important it is for growing businesses.

While so many of us live in our inboxes – inboxes are often times overwhelmingly inefficient. We miss important messages, receive too many unimportant messages and end up using email for a task management tool – sigh.

IBM’s Verse aims to help with that – from the demo and interface I saw – it looks quite promising.

IBM Verse takes a vastly different approach to enterprise email by integrating the many ways employees connect each day – via email, meetings, calendars, file sharing, instant messaging, social updates, video chats and more – through a single collaboration environment. It is the first messaging system to feature ‘faceted search,’ which enables users to pinpoint and retrieve specific information they’re seeking across all the various types of content within their email.

IBM Verse uses built-in analytics to provide an ‘at-a-glance’ view that intelligently surfaces an individual’s most critical actions for the day. By learning unique employee preferences and priorities over time, it provides instant context about a given project as well as the people and teams collaborating on it. This is in contrast to most freely available mail services that mine a user’s inbox to increase advertising and monetize that data in other ways – an unwelcome proposition for business users concerned about privacy or which operate in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.